Auden and the Inklings: An Alliterative Revival

Carl Phelpstead, Cardiff University

Recent criticism has done a great deal to illuminate W. H. Auden's medievalism, and especially his Anglo-Saxonism. Auden's revival and adaptation of the alliterative meter of Old and Middle English (and Old Norse) poetry is one of the most striking instances of his debt to medieval literature. Discussions of Auden's alliterative poetry have, however, treated it as an isolated and idiosyncratic phenomenon; the aim of this article is to contextualize Auden's use of alliterative meter by comparing it with alliterative verse by C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Nevill Coghill, three members of an informal group of academics and writers called the "Inklings, " who met regularly in C. S. Lewis's rooms in Magdalen College, Oxford, to read and discuss their work.